Oil sand generally comprises water-wet sand grains held together by a matrix of viscous heavy oil or bitumen. Bitumen is a complex and viscous mixture of large or heavy hydrocarbon molecules. The Athabasca oil sand deposits may be efficiently extracted by surface mining which involves shovel-and-truck operations. The mined oil sand is trucked to crushing stations for size reduction, and fed into slurry preparation units where hot water and caustic (sodium hydroxide) are added to form an oil sand slurry. The oil sand slurry may be further conditioned by transporting it using a hydrotransport pipeline to a primary separation vessel (PSV) where the conditioned slurry is allowed to separate under quiescent conditions for a prescribed retention period into a top layer of bitumen froth, a middle layer of middlings (i.e., warm water, fines, residual bitumen), and a bottom layer of coarse tailings (i.e., warm water, coarse solids, residual bitumen). The bitumen froth, middlings and tailings are separately withdrawn. The bitumen froth is de-aerated, heated, and treated to produce diluted bitumen which is further processed to produce synthetic crude oil and other valuable commodities.
“Fines” are particles such as fine quartz and other heavy minerals, colloidal clay or silt generally having any dimension less than about 44 μm. “Coarse solids” are solids generally having any dimension greater than about 44 μm. Oil sand extraction typically involves processing ores which are relatively high in bitumen content and low in fines content. However, there exists an abundance of “poor ores” which alone yield poor bitumen recovery and consequently cannot be processed unless a high proportion of high-grade, good ores are blended into these dry ore feeds. “Poor ores” are oil sand ores generally having low bitumen content (about 6 to about 10%) and/or high fines content (greater than about 30%). In comparison, “good ores” are oil sand ores generally having high bitumen content (about 10 to about 12% or higher) and/or low fines content (less than about 20%).
Caustic is used in bitumen extraction to improve bitumen recovery and froth quality. Caustic promotes the release of natural surfactants from bitumen to the aqueous phase, precipitates divalent cations such as calcium and magnesium, modifies the electrical surface potential of bitumen and solids, adjusts the pH, and makes solids more hydrophilic, leading to better bitumen-solids separation. For an oil sand ore, there is normally an optimal caustic dosage at which the highest bitumen recovery can be obtained and the optimal dosage appears to be determined by both the fines content (Sanford, E., 1983, Can. J. Chem. Eng. 61:554-567) and the ore grade.
However, in industrial operations, the amount of caustic is typically based on ore grade only since fines content is generally inversely related to ore grade and online grade analyzers are readily available. To calculate the amount of caustic, the caustic dosing curve is defined as:y=−0.087Ln(x)+0.2183  (I)where y is the caustic dosage (wt % of oil sand) and x is the ore grade (%). The same amount of caustic is thus used for ores of the same grade regardless of their fines content. As a result, overdosing could occur for ores having lower fines content, while under-dosing could occur for ores having higher fines content. The dosing of caustic is thus not optimized, with some caustic being wasted for ores having lower fines content.
Accordingly, there is a need for an improved method of optimizing the amount of caustic used in bitumen extraction.